Tumors in a skin tissue section.WIKIMEDIA, LWozniak & KWZielinskiThe device: Often, the best way to rid patients of cancer is to cut out the tumor itself, but this strategy risks removing healthy tissue along with malignant. Surgeons hoping to extract tumors without slicing away healthy tissue send samples to pathologists for analysis—a process that can take more than half an hour and is often required several times during surgery. But now, according to a report published today (July 17) in Science Translational Medicine, researchers have successfully used mass spectrometry to distinguish between healthy and cancerous tissue in the operating room, giving surgeons on-the-spot information about the tissue they’re considering removing.
“I believe it’s the first time mass spectrometry has been used this way”—to give real-time information on biological samples in humans, said Zheng Ouyang, a biomedical engineer at Purdue University, who was not involved in the research.
The researchers, led by Zoltán Takáts, an analytical chemist at Imperial College London, created a device they dubbed the iKnife (for “intelligent knife”), which transmits the smoke generated by hot surgical tools to a mass spectrometer for near-instant analysis. After testing the device in mice in 2010, Takáts and his team were ready to make the jump to human patients.
What’s new: Although mass-spectrometry analysis of tumor samples is nothing new, and many researchers are working on devising mass-spec-based biomedical applications, the technique has been difficult to bring ...
